RON flood on interbank market helps state borrow cheaper, hurts depositors

RON flood on the currency market considerably cheapened the state’s borrowings in January, and bankers also started revising the “lavish” interest rates paid for clients’ deposits, which dropped by as much as one percentage point. Instead, nobody is speaking about cheaper loans for private sector clients, with bankers preferring to thus fatten their profit margins.
The tone of optimism with which international market investors started the year translated in Bucharest in falling yields at which the state manages to place its certificates and bonds, which went below the 7% per annum threshold after a long break. For one-year treasury certificates, the yield dropped by a third of a percentage point to 6.69% per annum.
For people keeping their savings with banks, though, January brought no positive news: bankers resumed interest rate cuts, so that most players now placed their offers in the range of 5-7% per annum for RON deposits, including thus NBR’s benchmark rate of 6.25% per annum.